You're about to leave work and wonder if there's any milk for your evening cuppa. A quick phone call confirms that there's no-one home to ask. So you use your mobile phone to call your fridge. Tapping a couple of buttons, you discover that the last pint was opened yesterday.
When you're a few minutes from your house, you tap another button. At home the bath starts running, lights come on, the heating kicks in and the CD selector pulls out your favourite album to unwind to. In the kitchen, the kettle fills itself and starts to boil. As you pull in to your drive, sensors detect the car, the garage door slides open, and laser lights guide you carefully into place.
The code to deactivate the house alarm and turn off the motion detectors is entered through your mobile phone and sent wirelessly to the house as you walk up the path. When you get to the front door, it is already open. As you walk around your house, the music follows you from room to room. After your bath, you decide to watch a movie, so select the DVD button on the remote control in your living room. A screen slides silently out of the ceiling, the curtains close, and the lights dim according to the settings you've programmed in. The stereo system adjusts automatically for surround sound. All you have to do is sit back and eat the popcorn.
It may sound far-fetched, but this is all now possible. The technology exists and has been around for a while. Orange built a house in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, to showcase these possibilities a couple of years ago. In the USA, systems such as this one are increasingly popular. But they haven't taken off in the same way in the UK. This is partly due to cost but also because detached houses set in plenty of land with driveways and garages aren't as prevalent here as they are in the US. There aren't as many advantages to stuffing a terraced Victorian three-bedroom house with all those gizmos. The re-wiring alone would be a nightmare - or would it?
You don't have to go with the fully-fledged, house-that-thinks-for-itself kind of arrangement. Let's face it, that sort of setup seems rather creepy. It's the kind of scenario that has provided fodder for many horror and sci-fi stories. The theme even pops up in The Simpsons when the Ultrahouse 3000, voiced by Pierce Brosnan, takes a shine to Marge and tries to do away with Homer.
In reality, you don't even have to re-cable your home. In this article, we'll show you how some of the ideas outlined above are feasible. We'll look at your options if you're refurbishing or building your own home, as well as how to install home automation systems using the existing wiring in your house.
Housing benefits
There are degrees of home automation. You could go the whole hog for lazy luxury, or you could simply have control over the lighting in a room - programming the lamps and overhead lights to come on at a brightness level to suit your mood, for example. You could hire a home installer to custom-build your automated systems to suit your house, or you could go the DIY route. There's a small but dedicated - and some would say obsessed - group of people doing it their own way.
Smaller home-installation jobs are well within the reach of DIY lovers with a little electronics experience - such as those who enjoy putting together their own printed circuit boards (PCBs) and mucking about with a soldering iron, judging by some enthusiasts' websites. These sites are a good source of advice for your own project; take a look at the Contacts box at the end of this article.
House work
To control household devices, the first thing you need is a home network. This could entail professional rewiring undertaken by experts, or it could be a simple, self-installed system based around a home computer. Alternatively, you could use the existing wiring in your house, such as the mains cabling, with a technology such as X10. Combining automated systems with a home PC network makes sense, particularly if you have a broadband internet connection you'd like to share round the computers in your house. With many setups, particularly those at the entry-level end of the market, the entire system can be run from your PC. A software program will allow you to make changes to your system, such as altering settings or creating new ones.
Most of the home automation products available transmit and receive data through wires and cables. Wireless technology hasn't taken hold in this market as yet; it is not as fast or as cheap as the wired options, nor is it as secure. However, there is clearly a place for it. Until recently, there were two types of wireless technology used in home setups: Home Radio Frequency and wireless fidelity (WiFi). Home RF was developed in 1998 by the Home RF Working Group, which was made up of Compaq, Proxim, IBM, HP and others. It was meant to be an open standard for transmitting data in the unlicensed 2.4GHz band. However, Home RF has been superseded by WiFi, or 802.11b as it is also known. This standard operates in the same 2.4GHz frequency, but it transmits data faster. Furthermore, a greater uptake by manufacturers has resulted in more products being made available. Economies of scale have meant that WiFi products are also cheaper than Home RF devices. In fact, declining sales caused the Home RF Working Group to disband at the beginning of this year and, although this doesn't mean that companies have to stop making the products, it makes continued production unlikely.
As a cable replacement for a home network, WiFi is ideal. It allows home users to move from room to room with their notebook, for example, and still maintain an internet connection. However, data transfer speeds are not fast enough to cope with the demands of tasks such as video and audio streaming. Cable is still the better option for sending DVD movies to different rooms, for example.
WiFi is also held back by security issues. Its encryption setting isn't enabled by default and many users never get round to switching it on. In addition, it can be broken easily using tools widely available on the internet. But this shouldn't prove a problem: home users are unlikely to have confidential corporate data, and malicious hackers don't tend to target such small networks.
Wired options
If you're planning on re-wiring your home or you're building your own house, you should consider getting a structured wiring job done. For this, you'd be wise to call in the professionals. You can get a list of the custom installers in the UK from the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association (CEDIA); see the Contacts box opposite. A system similar to the one pictured above could set you back around £20,000 - and that's just a basic system. To set up multi-room audio, you should budget for between £400 to £1,000 per room. A basic system controller, used to program the settings for automated devices, will cost around £3,800.
The controller, or distribution box, is the heart of your automated house and must be connected to all the automated devices in your home somehow. Most of the literature on this subject recommends that the minimum wiring in each room should consist of a four-pair UTP CAT5 cable and an RG-6 coaxial cable. These meet the requirements of telephone, satellite, cable and data services. Additional tasks, such as multimedia communications services, and support for multiple communications technologies in a home office, require additional cabling. Most of this advice originates from the US, which dominates much of the home automation market. So how applicable is it to UK users? Mark McCall, the man behind the highly respected, UK-based Automated Home website, has this to say:
"Some people feel there is less need to run CAT5 data cable with the proliferation of wireless data networking gear available. However, readers of my mailing list have installed several kilometres of CAT5 in their homes. I have eight CAT5 points behind my audiovisual system and I have only one spare already. The experience of my group is that you can never have too much CAT5 installed. The cable is so cheap and such a minute cost in the building price of a house: the cost of running four cables is little more than running one. RG6 is a pretty crappy coax cable. In the UK we tend to use CT100, which is a digital satellite grade dual-screened coax. I'd also advise running two coaxes to each room."
The home automation setup has a central computer, which is used to control all the devices in the system. It receives signals and forwards these to the relevant system or appliance. You can use the computer to program your automated devices and adjust settings. When it comes to sending commands to the central computer, there are a number of options. In each room there will be discreet wall panels with a touchscreen LCD display. The most common default is for these to be set to display lighting and audio options. A press of a button will reveal other menus, perhaps for home cinema. When you enter a room, you'd press Lighting 1 to switch on all the lights, Lighting 2 for a more ambient setting, and so on. Alternatively, you can control automated devices using a remote control keypad or even your mobile phone.
Cheaper options
It is possible to automate your home without digging out the walls to put in new wiring. There are three standards for automating devices in the home: LonWorks, consumer electronics bus (CEBus) and X10. These protocols allow signals to be sent out over existing electrical wiring such as mains wiring. Of the three, X10 is the only one widely available. It was developed 25 years ago by Scottish company Pico Electronics and, although relatively unheard of here, has taken the US by storm with products based on the technology dominating the market.
X10 sends messages as low-voltage coded signals from a transmitter or controller to the unique address of an X10 receiver. The receiver could be attached to your curtains or a lamp. A controller can support between eight and 256 addresses. An X10 light switch would replace an existing light switch, for instance. You could still flick your lights on and off manually, but you would also be able to send a signal to the switch to get the same result. There are different types of controllers: a basic module to operate your lamps, which could be used with an infrared remote control, or a timer so you could have messages sent at a specified time. These are inexpensive, easy to install and available from common electronic retailers such as Maplin. However they have limited use - and once you've been bitten by the home automation bug you'll be hankering after something with a bit more power.
Outside the box
The next level up are controller boxes that can be programmed from the comfort of your PC. There's no need to keep your PC running for the boxes to work, but the software will allow you to see what the system is doing as it works. This is great if you have an overwhelming desire to see when it has switched a light on, in case you didn't notice yourself.
Once you've got the box connected to your PC, the next logical step is to integrate it with a security system such as CCTV. Once you reach this point be careful, as it's only a short step to obsession; you could soon find yourself building racks in the loft to house your servers and hubs.
So, will X10 still be around in another 25 years, or is there another standard waiting in the wings? According to McCall, there is a promising successor: "My readers are currently excited about the new C-Bus system from Clipsal, which is available in the UK. This is a hard-wired system, and is really only for new homes as there is special wiring required. It's roughly twice the cost of X10, but that's good value for a system of its quality."
He continued: "I expect the future of retro-fit systems to be filled by wireless technology. I imagine products using WiFi and Bluetooth may appear in the mid-term. Ethernet appliances are appearing too - lamps that plug into the mains as well as a CAT5 socket, allowing you to control them from your PC."
Author: Lynley Oram
Home help